


your pursuits are called outstanding

by therm0dynamics



Category: Drive (2011), True Detective
Genre: (duh), Action, Cars, Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 07:15:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4470173
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/therm0dynamics/pseuds/therm0dynamics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Soon as his rider steps into the bar, Driver knows he’s five-oh.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】your pursuits are called outstanding（2/2）](https://archiveofourown.org/works/10348221) by [liangdeyu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liangdeyu/pseuds/liangdeyu)



> i re-read drive after re(x6)watching it the other day and then i got the Bright Idea to cross it over with the OTHER ultraviolent hyperstylized neo-noir feat. morally ambiguous anti-hero protagonist that takes place in los angeles ... hehe. set sometime pre-narrative for both works.
> 
> title taken from "a real hero" by college. all the car talk is 200% nonsense because i know 0% about cars. you most likely don’t need to see drive to understand everything but please watch it anyway. it’s fucking brilliant. one of my all-time favorites.

Soon as his rider steps into the bar, Driver knows he’s five-oh.

It’s the way he walks. Half the films Driver’s worked for recently are those shitty direct-to-video police dramas and the director’s always yelling that the actors don’t walk right. Cops have this bullish swagger comes from slinging around a heavy gun belt and all that governmental authority day in day out – those C-listers couldn’t hack it, but this guy, try as he might to downplay it, he was the real deal.

This is a first for Driver. He’s half a mind to slip out sight unseen right now because no chance in _hell_ is this a good idea – but the job had come from a reputable source. Frank Semyon. Someone PD would never hang around. Meaning, this guy was either bent or dead desperate, or both.

Well. We’ve all been there. He stays. 

\--

“Christ, you’re just a kid,” the cop says first thing before he even finishes sitting down. Driver glances up and smiles a little, which he knows isn’t helping the issue. He’s looked in the mirror enough times to know what most people think when they look at him. The blue-eyed blond-haired pretty boy thing deceives most people well enough that they never see him coming, but Cop doesn’t look fooled more as wary.

Besides, Cop isn’t much older than he is, though one could be excused for not realizing it. The guy looks halfway to being a vagrant. He’s got a week’s worth of stubble and needs a haircut and smells like he’d showered in cheap beer and jitters around like a cokehead. But underneath it all, there’s something young and deeply furious in his look. Every kid has that day when they realize just how shitty and uncaring the world really is; it’s like the past year of Cop’s life had been that day on repeat.

Driver takes a moment to wonder if the job’s gonna be a shitshow ‘cause Cop’s kind of a shitshow. Cop chainsmokes three cigarettes down to the filter in as many minutes, letting the smoke out slowly, almost ritualistically. He’s dead to the world. A scarred-up waitress passes by and smiles in a familiar way at him. He doesn’t even notice her.

This bar, which probably sprang into existence already underlit and grimy as hell, has the unwelcome sense of being some kind of purgatory for unlucky sons of bitches like Cop and, Driver supposes, himself as well. On stage, the world's saddest-eyed singer perches on a wooden stool and croons what sounds to Driver like one long endless note of melancholy. Cop was the one suggested they meet at this existential waiting room in the middle of nowhere. Driver guesses it’s his usual drinking spot, refuge in familiarity and all that. 

“Apparently you’re the best there is,” Cop says finally. Spoken as a fact, not an indictment. And suddenly Cop doesn’t look so young anymore. He pulls on a pair of leather gloves not unlike Driver’s own. The look in his dark eyes settles into something flat and bitter. “So. Wanna do this?”

\--

“ _That’s_ your ride?” Cop asks doubtfully, as Driver approaches the beat-up Honda Civic sitting in a shadowy corner of the lot. Driver inclines his head.

He’d picked up the Civic a few days prior. It didn't look like much, which was the point. It had just been a dented wreck moldering in the back of a used-car lot, but he’d gotten Shannon to jack the engine and tune the chassis up so tight that anyone else wouldn’t have been able to drive it out the parking lot without oversteering and fishtailing into three lanes of traffic. _In your hands_ , Shannon had declared, _this car could outrun a fighter jet._

“One more thing,” Cop says, and goes over to his own vehicle. Driver eyes Cop’s monstrous six-liter V-8 Dodge Charger – matte black – and nearly snorts. Fucking bad-boy car. If he hadn’t pegged his rider for law enforcement earlier, this would’ve been the dead giveaway. Way that thing looks, sounds, and attracts attention, you might as well be driving around a tank.

Cop returns with several fifty-five gallon trash bags and some duct tape and starts lining the trunk of the Civic with quick, efficient motions.

“Dead or alive?” Driver asks, leaning against the side of the car.

“You told me over the phone you were just gonna drive. I give you a time and a place, you give me a five minute window, that’s how it works,” Cop says, apparently hearing a challenge where Driver never suggested one. “You didn’t mention anything about wanting the fucking specifics.”

Driver rolls the toothpick he’s chewing around in his mouth, considers how it’d feel to jam it into someone’s eye.

“Dead body balances weight differently than a live one,” he explains. “Helps with the driving.”

A beat. Cop regards Driver with his resentful stare. “Alive,” he says. “Bad news for him. My boss wants a word.”

\--

As soon as they pull up to the curb in front of the house, Cop takes a deep hit from his flask and pulls a black ski mask over his face. Driver catches the scent of alcohol on him, a smell not unlike the chemical burn of gasoline, and then Cop’s opening the door and out of the car. 

“Here we go,” he says, and sprints up the driveway.

Driver starts the five-minute countdown and tunes his scanner to pick up police chatter as soon as Cop breaks down the door of the house. He disappears inside with absolute intent. No hesitation. This guy’s less police than a police dog, albeit one sold and leashed to a rather more questionable owner.

He wonders what exactly this Semyon guy has on Cop that keeps him so well in line, but he quickly drops the line of thought. It’s much safer to leave that shit well alone. A lawyer would call it plausible deniability, but Driver knows nothing about all that. He just considers it best practices.

Cop proves efficient, if not exactly subtle, and by the three-fifty mark he’s already dragged someone out in a headlock, bound and gagged with duct tape, alarms blaring and floodlights blazing behind him.

Driver pops the trunk and feels the Civic bounce as a body drops into the back and starts flailing around.

Then a _thud-thud-THUD_ and the thrashing goes still. The car jerks again as the trunk slams. Driver frowns. Piece of precisely calibrated machinery like this, and Cop was banging it around like a perp he’d just arrested.

He pushes the passenger door open, and Cop scrambles in just as a small fleet of vehicles comes screaming in from nowhere.

"Fucking drive!" Cop yells.

Driver obliges.

\--

There’s no chatter on the police scanner, so whoever Cop’s abducted is likely not some law-abiding citizen. It stands to reason that his friends, now on his tail, aren’t either. 

“Here they come,” Cop says, twisting in his seat. “They don’t seem happy.”

Their pursuers are big, blocky, mob boss cars that handle with all the grace of refrigerators on wheels.

“Hold on,” Driver says.

Bearing steadily northeast, he corners the gridded streets going about thirty over the speed limit. _More like speed_ suggestions, _right_ , Driver mentally hears Shannon say. An awful joke. Driver smiles.

The pursuit just barely keeps up, but then Driver guns it onto a wide straight boulevard and slows just enough for the two big SUVs on his tail to think they’re gaining. The next cross-street’s three hundred yards away and he makes the four-way intersection just as the lead SUV, a hulking Suburban, keys up to ram him. At the last possible minute as Driver _just_ noses past the crosswalk line he pulls the steering wheel a half-turn to the left and jerks up hard on the parking brake.

The back wheels lock up with a squeal and the Civic slides into a hard turn around the sharp corner and then straightens out again.

With one eye on the rearview, Driver watches the Suburban try to follow, but no chance. Almost in slow motion, it tips to its side. Then it skids. Keeps skidding in a shower of sparks, clear across the boulevard. Hits the curb and rolls to its wheels again.

The Escalade behind it tries to brake, but it’s like stopping a barreling freight train. It broadsides the Suburban. Unstoppable force, immovable object.

Cop catches Driver’s eye in the mirror. He’s been silent so far, either out of good sense or catatonic shock. 

The two cars that did make the turn bear down hard – a Town Car in the lead and an Impala lurking ominously in the back. Then, a rattle of gunfire, and the Civic’s back window shatters in a spray of glass. 

“Shit!” Cop yells, and Driver flicks his eyes to the sideview mirror. The Town Car looms monstrous and dark. It might be unwieldy, but there’s a lot of speed in it once it gets moving, and Driver feels a jarring crash as it rear-ends him. He hears the engine roar as it pulls back for another hit.

The entrance to the freeway appears ahead in the opposite lane. Driver shoots past it a hundred yards, pulls to the left as if to swerve, and suddenly yanks the wheel hard to the right – a pendulum turn into a powerslide and the Civic spins a tight one-eighty and goes barrelling back down the way it came.

The Town Car overshoots and spins out, coming to a screeching stop in a cloud of burning rubber, but the Impala is incredibly right there behind him, comes whipping in and clips his left rear bumper. 

The Impala’s heavier pound for pound so the Civic goes fishtailing – and no way in hell is it built for a rally car stunt like this, but Driver deliberately oversteers into the spin and hits the freeway on-ramp going close to ninety as he squeezes the brakes, drifting the Civic around the long, slow bend like something straight out of Hollywood. The Impala, following at speed and unable to correct its path in time, smashes into the steel barrier and flips, clearing the guardrail to land upside-down on the street ten feet below.

Then they’re on the six-lane freeway, no cars behind them or in front of them this time at night, and Driver throttles up wide open and they’re home free.

\--

After steady silence from the police scanner, Driver stops paying attention and lets his mind meander back to the job. Not bad overall, he thinks. Though he could’ve handled better on those first few corners. Should’ve seen that Impala coming also, and that brake-drift at the end was a touch too light – 

“Christ, you are _insane_ ,” Cop mumbles. Driver still feels the tension simmering in him, but it’s tempered now with relief as he comes down from the adrenaline high. “Where’d you learn to do all that?”

“I drive for the movies. Pick things up here and there,” Driver says. He gestures to Cop. “You have blood on your shirt.” Cop looks down, rubs a finger over the offending spot on his collar. Then, because it’s been all quiet from the trunk and the car _feels_ like it’s hauling two hundred pounds of dead weight, Driver clears his throat. “Is he ... ”

“He’s still alive. I just knocked him out with a tire iron to keep him quiet. It’s the best he’s gonna feel all night, though. He’s gonna have a hell of a headache when he wakes up, and _then_ he’s in for it.”

This all comes tumbling out in one overlong stream of words, like this is something Cop’s been holding back since the bar. There’s a beat. Considering whether he’s said too much, maybe.

“Listen, I’m not – ” Cop says, and trails off.

Driver plays mental Mad Libs to guess what Cop’s not. A killer? A bad man? Always this way? _Usually_ this way? Doing this because he wants to? Option F, all of the above?

“It’s okay,” Driver says.

“No. This isn’t who I am,” Cop continues resolutely, like he needs someone to understand this and it might as well be this getaway driver he’s never gonna see again. “This is who I _have_ to be.”

Alright, Driver says. He thinks back to the bitter look in Cop’s eyes as they left the bar, his deadly sense of purpose on the job. His hurt, his deep unceasing anger. Driver recognizes all of it now as defeat. No wonder Cop’s a strung-out half-alcoholic wreck.

“You have someone in your life? Someone you’d do anything to protect ‘cause you love them so much, like something even beyond giving your own life?” 

Like giving your soul, Driver finishes mentally, and thinks about Shannon. He shakes his head no. Doesn’t know why. He loves Shannon like a father, but still he says no. Curious.

“If you do, then you’re gonna understand,” Cop says, and lights up another cigarette. _If_ , not _when_. Driver appreciates that. There’s not so many beautiful things in the world that want to get close to him, and vice versa, and it’d be a hollow platitude to suggest one day he’d find something. He thinks Cop might feel the same. He rolls down the passenger window to vent the smoke, even though the cool night breeze is already rushing in through the broken rear windshield.

“It’s okay,” Driver repeats, because he can’t say he gets it. He doesn’t get people. Machines, he gets. Machines are easy to understand. But people, people are messy, inside and out. Messy with their emotions. Messy with their brains splattered out against a wall.

Driver, he’s a machine. Eats and sleeps, fucks when he has to, drives like hell the rest of the time. Easy. Cop, he’s a person. Whatever he’s got tangled in him is gonna stay there festering until he dies, try as he might to burn it out with drink and smoke and fury.

He wants to say something to Cop. Something about how this heroic little car he was sitting in right now was a one-and-done deal, was already dying as they drove. He’d probably stripped the crankshaft. A death blow. He could feel it shuddering through his body.

The point was, you couldn’t run a secondhand scrapheap shell on rocket fuel and slam it around like he’d done and expect it to come out any semblance of okay on the other end. A car wasn’t built for that kind of life. Nothing was built for that kind of life. Nothing steel and carbide, nothing flesh and bone.

But he suspects Cop understands cars about as well as Driver understands people, so he switches on the radio and lets music fill the silence instead. Dreamy synthpop soaks the air. He’s lucky. He’s not like Cop, ‘cause this isn’t who he _has_ to be, this is just who he is and has been and always will be. A driver.

Neon drenches his vision. Nighttime in Los Angeles. All the colors of the rainbow and a few shades in between. At the speed he’s going, the colors streak by like a bad trip. A flash in the pan, a long bright tunnel to nowhere.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (very brief) (drive-centered) epilogue to follow!!!


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a hard goodbye, but he’s gonna do it.

Years later, as Driver’s bleeding out in a shitty pay-per-hour motel room somewhere on the outskirts of the Valley, he finds out what Cop had so wanted him to understand.

Not that he remembers Cop’s face or his words at all. He’s driven so many jobs between back then and right now that it’s long since blurred together.

But he remembers the afternoon he’d taken Irene and Benicio cruising along the Los Angeles River. And as he drove back Benicio had fallen asleep in Irene’s arms and Irene’d laid her head on his shoulder. And everything was molten in the cast of the setting sun – the sliver of water in the drainage ditch, the concrete overpasses soaring weightless overhead, the hood of his Chevelle gleaming like new. But Irene’s hair and eyes shining most of all. The world around him like El Dorado and Mary and Child in his front seat.

So much beauty in the world all concentrated on him for that one moment in time. That’s all he’d get before everything went to hell just days later, but just that was enough for a lifetime.

Driver looks at the million dollars in the duffel bag on the ground. Looks at the mobsters lying dead on the floor, Blanche lying half-headless in the bathroom.

Now it’s his heart and soul on the line. And it’s a hard goodbye, but he’s gonna do it. It’s time to go. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> usual apologies for writing ridiculous long-ass crossovers like 24/7/365, car shenanigans, and making shit up about los angeles. i HIGHLY recommend james sallis’ book and hossein amini’s screenplay if you want actually great literature and not this low-grade nonsense.
> 
> and of course, watch the film ;)
> 
> hope you enjoyed, let me know what you think!


End file.
